In what follows I offer an
interpretation of the puzzle posed by Greenberg’s failure to come to terms with
the explosion of postmodernist experimentation in the 1960’s. Greenberg, one of
the most influential critics of the immediately preceding period and a strong
supporter of New York abstract expressionism and color field painting, is
indelibly associated with of modernist schools of painting. His short essay,
“Modernist Painting” [1] valorized precisely these movements and was a tour de force
catapulting Greenberg into critic superstar status; it is still one of the
central documents in debates about modernism. Because Greenberg there makes
references to Kant’s aesthetics in identifying the virtues of modernism his
account is usually interpreted in terms of the formalism of the period and
Kant’s analytic of the beautiful. This offers a reading of Greenberg as a
formalist and as identifying modernism with a concern for the formal properties
of art, the flatness of the picture frame and the formal relations between the
aesthetic properties. Greenberg was also celebrated as having a legendary
acuteness of aesthetic appreciation—a critical eye penetrating immediately to a
work’s aesthetic depth.

“Modernist
Painting” was delivered as a radio lecture in 1960 and was reprinted several
times during the 60s. At the very same time artistic movements which would
later become identified as post-modernist—in contrast to Greenberg’s modernism—pop
art, op art, happenings, performance art, and the like, were contesting the
serious, formal focus of Modernist abstraction replacing it with assemblages of
pop-cultural items, jokes, playful borrowings and deliberately erasing the
boundaries between high and popular art by bringing genres like mysteries,
science fiction, popular film into the art world. Famously, Greenberg failed to
navigate these currents and sank like a stone. The puzzle is why? Did Greenberg’s
commitment to a Kantian style of formalism blind him to the new possibilities
for making art? Did his “eye”—acutely trained but aimed at too narrow a target—fail
him? Or was it just that, as Greenberg appeared to think, the new postmodern
work was worthless crap?

In this paper I take the view that Kant’s
contribution to Greenberg’s account of modernism is more complex than is
usually appreciated. I argue that Greenberg deploys Kant not so much to define artistic properties—the subject of the Analytic of the Beautiful,the text so closely associated with formalism—as to engage in a legitimation discourse defending the very
right of art to exist. This suggests that it is not only Kant’s third critique
which informs Greenberg’s modernism, but also Kant’s writing on emancipation
and political legitimacy. It also suggests that Greenberg’s modernism is large
enough as a theory to encompass the “postmodern” movements which he was unable
to appreciate, and so, for his failure, we must blame not his Kantianism but his
eye.

Reflection on Greenberg’s deferential employment of Kant in his vastly influential piece
“Modernist Painting” reveals a curious doubleness. The piece is widely read as
a manifesto of high modernist formalism, but the conception of artistic value we
find there appeals to formalist considerations packaged inside an historicist
context in a decidedly unstable equilibrium. This double appeal raises the
question of whether Greenberg’s explicit invocation of Kant in the piece is
compatible with his broader commitments to a more Hegelian critical modernism
which locates value in an historical narrative. This, of course, is not a novel
thought, indeed the doubleness we can find in Greenberg appears in other
modernist writers and even in Kant, and has been subjected to considerable
attention. On the other hand, it seems to me to offer us resources for
understanding the puzzle which Greenberg’s place in the art world poses for us.
Greenberg is often considered America’s most important 20th century
critic, someone equipped with an unerring eye and possessing a keen grasp of
the historical irruption of Modernity, but he seemed unable to appreciate the
exuberant waves of artistic experimentation in the sixties either ocularly or
theoretically. If this is a failure, then of what kind is it?

To answer this puzzle in a productive way it will be useful to spend some time
attempting to open up this doubleness. Greenberg introduces Modernism as
covering “almost the whole of what is truly alive in our culture” [2] and yet as a unique
event, the emergence of cultural self-criticism as Kantian critique. He begins
by identifying Modernism with the self-critical tendency that he sees as
originating with Kant saying, “Because he was the first to criticize the means
itself of criticism, I conceive of Kant as, the first real Modernist.” [3] So while Kant is deeply
identified with the Enlightenment project, Greenberg identifies in Kant’s use
of a discipline’s methods to criticise the discipline itself, a deeper form of
criticism and indeed a break from the enlightenment. So while the
self-criticism of Modernism grows out of the criticism of the Enlightenment
they are not the same. “The Enlightenment criticized from the outside, the way
criticism in its accepted sense does; Modernism criticizes from the inside,
through the procedures themselves of that which is being criticized.” [4]

From this apparently simple beginning it
is but a step for him to notice the failure of religion to engage in modernist
self-criticism and its subsequent collapse into therapy, then to pose the task
of self-criticism to Art, and from there to argue that what is essential in art
is its medium. “Modernist Painting” was atour de force as an advertisement for abstract expressionism, but
here my interest lies in Greenberg’s deceptively simple account of the modern
as contrasted with the enlightenment.

To unpack what I have in mind I want to turn briefly to three related texts. I
want first to look at Kant’s astonishing (1784) essay, “Answer to the Question:
What is Enlightenment?” [5] with which Greenberg’s piece has deep resonances. [6] I then want to turn to Foucault’s
explicit commentary on Kant’s text, “What is Enlightenment?” [7], and finally to Lyotard’s implicit
commentary, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” [8] Both of these commentaries were
published in English in 1984 or approximately midway between “Modernist
Painting” and the present, distant enough both from Greenberg’s text and
present concerns to provide an informed and suitably distanced conception of
both Modernism and the Postmodern. We will see then, I think, an argument that
Greenberg is right to claim Kant to be the first modernist (indeed we will see
perhaps that Kant—is only retrospectively, of course—the first postmodernist).
After this I want to close with some minimal and conservative remarks about the
compatibility of Greenberg’s account of Modernism and postmodern art and the
relation of his theory and eye.

Kant, of course, does not use the word
“modern” in his little essay nor was it available in its present meaning in his
time; his overt topic is to answer the question, “What is enlightenment?” Kant
does not identify enlightenment with the mere attainment of knowledge. Instead,
his answer boldly put is that enlightenment is humanity’s emergence or exit
from a self-imposed immaturity, which he in turn characterises as the inability
to use reason without obedience to the rule of another, an inability which is
self-imposed because it rests not on a failure to understand but the lack of
resolve or courage to use reason without the guidance of another. To be
enlightened is thus to be internally self-directed, to think for oneself. Enlightenment must also be a social historical
process; historically individuals have been subject to external authorities, by
paternalistic governments, the learning from antiquity and religious
authorities. The social practice of thinking critically requires a level of
openness, education and freedom. But this is not enough. This is a simple
statement which has clear connections with Kant’s conception of moral autonomy,
but one which is subject to a certain internal tension. In particular there is
an ambiguity about the possible role of the subject. The subject is humanity,
or human kind, but the immaturity specified is the sort which can only be overcome by the agency, and within the life, of the
human individual. Suitable external social arrangements, of course, make it easier for individuals to effect an exit from
human immaturity and become autonomous—and so Enlightenment ideas aimed at
fostering social conditions of human freedom are a prerequisite to the
possibility of autonomy. Kant’s focus on the resolute action of the individual
however makes it difficult for one to take these arrangements to be his
subject. Foucault begins his commentary on Kant’s essay on this note by saying [9]

A minor text,
perhaps. But it seems to me that it marks the discreet entrance into the
history of thought of a question that modern philosophy has not been capable of
answering, but that it has never managed to get rid of, either. And one that
has been repeated in various forms for two centuries now. From Hegel through
Nietzsche or Max Weber to Horkheimer or Habermas, hardly any philosophy has
failed to confront this same question, directly or indirectly. What, then, is
this event that is called the Aufklärung and that has determined, at least in
part, what we are, what we think, and what we do today? Let us imagine that the
Berlinische Monatschrift still exists and that it is asking its readers
the question: What is modern philosophy? Perhaps we could respond with an echo:
modern philosophy is the philosophy that is attempting to answer the question
raised so imprudently two centuries ago: Was ist Aufklärung?

A conventional way of understanding Kant’s
text is in terms of a characteristic idea of the Enlightenment, namely that all
people have equal dignity by virtue of their (potential) autonomous agency. To
be autonomous is to act on reasons which you give yourself, not out of
inclination but out of respect for the moral law. As a citizen of a free
society one’s freedom is structured and conditioned by laws, social roles and
position, which one must obey, but as a self-determining thinker one’s thoughts
are determined freely, so a mature citizen of a free society is both bound and
free in an harmonious synthesis. Kant’s discussion of the private and public
uses of reason addresses the question of which uses of reason hinder or require
enlightenment. The public uses of reason must always be free though private
uses may often be restricted; he puts the distinction like this: “I mean by the
public use of one’s reason the use which a scholar makes of it before the
entire reading public. Private use I call the use he may make of this reason in
a civic post or office.” [10] Kant follows this distinction
with an extended discussion of the ways in which the private use of reason may
be rightly subject to regulation. Towards the end of the piece Kant asks
whether we presently live in an enlightened age and answers no, but that we do
live in anage of enlightenment, indeed the age of Frederick, a
prince who rules but also exemplifies in his person the resolve of individual
enlightenment. Kant thus concludes his essay on a note of muted optimism
(tinged perhaps with irony).

But
this optimism is difficult for us to share. As we well know citizens of states
having public institutions which make freedom a public right may not act their
age. Public institutions which eliminate religious authoritarianism and feudal
class distinctions, and give the special sciences over to experts and laws to
the lawmakers are not enough to lift the superstition and darkness of the past,
which darkness gives the metaphor of enlightenment (as a world era in which
everything has been subjected to illuminating critique) its force.

As Foucault notes, Kant does not pose the
question of enlightenment in terms of a world era to which one belongs, or an
event whose signs are perceived, nor the dawning of a social accomplishment,
but negatively as a break, an exit offered to the
individual as citizen, a project which must be forged with resolve and courage
in the first person in the heart of each agent. It is in light of this fact
that Foucault writes: [11]

...that this
little text is located in a sense at the crossroads of critical reflection and
reflection on history. It is a reflection by Kant on the contemporary status
of his own enterprise. No doubt it is not the first time that a philosopher has
given his reasons for undertaking his work at a particular moment. But it
seems to me that it is the first time that a philosopher has connected in this
way, closely and from the inside, the significance of his work with respect to
knowledge, a reflection on history and a particular analysis of the specific
moment at which he is writing and because of which he is writing. It is in the
reflection on ‘today’ as difference in history and as motive for a particular
philosophical task that the novelty of this text appears to me to lie.

So said we may recognize a point of departure—the outline
of what one might call the attitude of modernity. This returns us to the
doubleness of Greenberg’s opening remarks. Modernist painting cannot simply be a technical
exercise in aesthetic form or merely the product of an intellectual critique of
what is essential to painting as a discipline. It is not enough to be the
product of an internal critique; it must also partake in the eventful character of enlightenment—it must
break with what has died and is no longer alive in the culture and, with
courage and resolve, forge something new. Indeed this break must be performed
by each artist in his or her own way freely. This also means that modernist
painting does not merely partake in the fleeting moment, the dizzying vertigo
of modernism as a simple break with the past, which Foucault attributes to
Baudelaire when he defines modernity as “the ephemeral, the fleeting, the
contingent.” For this is not all that he means; being modern does not consist
only in recognizing and accepting this perpetual movement. On the contrary, to
be modern is deliberately to adopt a certain difficult attitude with respect to
this movement which: [12]

...consists in
recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor
behind it, but within it. Modernity is distinct from fashion, which does no
more than call into question the course of time; modernity is the attitude that
makes it possible to grasp the ‘heroic’ aspect of the present moment.
Modernity is not a phenomenon of sensitivity to the fleeting present; it is the
will to ‘heroize’ the present.

The problem, as we all know, is that along
the way to modernization and external social arrangements which characterize a
free society, a space opens up in the culture, an opportunity for the
industries of pseudo-art and mass-entertainment, or Kitsch, as Greenberg characterised it, to entice the
immature with the pseudo-freedom of mass conformity. In his 1939 article
“Avant-garde and Kitsch” [13] Greenberg explained the
emergence of Kitsch in terms of the academization of the arts and the
routinization of cultural forms, due to the rise of literacy and capitalism—culture
as product and consumption rather than as discovery and self-formation. The
avant-garde emerges precisely as a consequence to defend aesthetic standards
from the decline of taste which is the product of consumer culture. Of course
by the time of “Modernist Painting” Greenberg no longer fully subscribed to his
earlier account of the connection between Kitsch and the Avant-garde, but not
all connection is lost. In his 1971 piece “Necessity of ‘Formalism’” [14], and even later in his “Modern and Postmodern” [15] we see Greenberg forging connections between the
emergence of Modernism or the Avant-garde and a cultural crisis of aesthetic
standards. In “Necessity of ‘Formalism’” Greenberg represents Modernism as an
historical reaction to Romanticism, “Modernism defines itself in the long run
not as a “movement,” much less a program, but rather as a kind of bias or
tropism: towards esthetic value, esthetic value as such and as an ultimate.” At
the same time he concludes the piece with the claim that “Quality, esthetic
value originates in inspiration, vision, ‘content,’ not in ‘form.’...Yet ‘form’
not only opens the way to inspiration; it can also act as means to it; and
technical preoccupations, when searching enough and compelled enough, can
generate or discover ‘content.’” The newness of Modernism is thus a repudiation
of sedimented ways of making content in favour of free creation.

In “Modern
and Postmodern” he says, “Modernism appeared in answer to a crisis. The surface
aspect of that crisis was a certain confusion of standards brought on by
romanticism...an academicization of the arts everywhere except in music and
prose fiction.” Above all Modernism is the break with all that is routine in
the academy and a dedication to a renovation of standards and a reaffirmation
of the past not by imitation but by emulation of what is great, but in new
ways. It is not hard to see in these quotes a refusal and repudiation of the
pseudo-art of mass cultural immaturity, which lives easily with dead forms and
sentimental inclinations, an immaturity one can exit only through the door of
modernist art.

Before moving on to more general
discussion, which can now be given the provisional description of Modernism as
the attempt to find aesthetic value “in recapturing something eternal that is
not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it”, I want to turn
to the third text I mentioned above: Lyotard’s, “Answering the question: What
is Postmodernism?” It may appear odd to treat this piece as an implicit
commentary on Kant’s “Was ist Aufklärung?”, especially as it is most readily
available to North Americans primarily as an appendix to his study of the
condition of knowledge in highly developed societies for the government of
Quebec, The Postmodern Condition, [16] which, after all, begins by
defining postmodernism as incredulity towards the heroic meta-narratives of the
Enlightenment, but the parallels with Kant’s essay are too exact and
intentionally structured to be accidental. For one thing, the incredulity to
which Lyotard refers is, in a way, a kind of parallel to the exit from
immaturity; here understood as uncritical trust in ‘freeing’ effects of the
real.

But
in any case, as we have seen, one of the problematic features of Kant’s essay,
is that it is often incorrectly taken to imply that life really can be gathered
together into a utopian cultural form (AKA, an Enlightened Age) in which the free
maturity of the citizen is guaranteed. And it is precisely this problematic
implication that forms Lyotard’s starting point, although it is Habermas rather
than Kant to whom it is attributed in his essay. Modernism has failed, says
Lyotard speaking for Habermas, to the extent the totality of life has
splintered into independent specialities which are relegated to the narrow
competence of experts. The remedy for the splintering of culture and its
separation from concrete life must be sought in art, but art transformed into a
unifying vehicle for healing the wounds of the separation of culture from life.
It is clear from Lyotard’s sarcasm that he sees Habermas’s nostalgia for a
1960s form of cultural therapy as a utopian pipe-dream which offers no genuine
vehicle for leaving immaturity behind. And what follows this beginning is a
discussion of the forms of immaturity characteristic of modernization and mass
culture—an analysis of the pornographic degeneration of art into Kitsch which
has strong affinities with Greenberg’s analysis 45 years earlier.

While
the tone is more pessimistic—and why shouldn’t it be?—the message is similar.
The culture industry feeds on and perpetuates the immaturity of the supposedly
free citizen by offering endless devices for preserving consciousness from
doubt and closing the door to enlightenment. As Lyotard puts it so colourfully: [17]

Industrial
photography and cinema will be superior to painting and the novel whenever the
objective is to stabilise the referent, to arrange it according to a point of
view which endows it with a recognisable meaning, to reproduce the syntax and
vocabulary which enable the addressee to decipher images and sequences quickly,
so to easily arrive at the consciousness of his own identity as well as the approval
he thereby receives from others.

To the artist
Lyotard advises that if they do not wish be agents—insignificant agents—of what
exists, they must refuse to lend themselves to therapeutic or pornographic uses
of mass conformism.

While I do not want to carry this fragile
parallel too far, Lyotard like Greenberg offers modern art as an exit from the
immaturity of the culture industry, identifying as modern that art which
devotes “its little technical expertise... to present the fact that the
unpresentable exists.” And what then is the postmodern for Lyotard? It is
undoubtedly part of the modern. He writes, “All that has been received, if only
yesterday… must be suspected. What space does Cézanne challenge? The
Impressionists’. What object do Picasso and Braque attack? Cézanne’s. What
presupposition does Duchamp break with in 1912? That which says one must make
a painting, be it cubist.” [18] And so on. “A work”, he
continues, “can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism
thus understood is not modernism at its end but in its nascent state, and this
state is constant.” For Lyotard the postmodern differs from the modern only
strategically; the modern presents the unpresentable “only as missing contents;
but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer the
viewer matter for solace and pleasure,” whereas the postmodern puts the
unpresentable forward in the presentation itself. If the modern is the
avant-garde the postmodern is its shock troops; but this is clearly a moving
distinction dependent on the viewer’s location and not a distinction of kind.
Because an artwork shelters the event of its making in material form and
preserves it for re-appropriation by its audience, for a work to be modern it
must be the product of a certain kind of artistic labour. Greenberg and Lyotard
are both quite clear about the character of this labour. It is a labour which
is the culmination of critical questioning of past works and the rules for
making which those works establish. To refuse to re-examine those rules is to
produce academic art, or Kitsch, imitations of outer form rather than
emulations of what is at stake in art. The postmodern artist simply works with
a shorter rope, working “without rules in order to formulate rules of what will have been done.” It is central to the
comparison I am making here that the artists championed by Greenberg in
“Modernist Painting” like Pollock, Newman, or Barnet were postmodern in just this sense.

Let
us now pause to revisit the various accounts of modernism on offer with an eye
to connecting the dots. We have seen a series of double definitions. First,
internal critique of what is essential to a discipline together with the
happening of what is truly alive in a culture. Second, the exit from immaturity
by way of courage and resolve to make free use of cognitive powers. Third, the
adoption of the difficult attitude which consists in recapturing something
eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it.
Finally, the struggle to use artistic techniques as devices for presenting the
fact that the unpresentable exists. Not all equivalent statements to be sure,
but there is enough unity to point in a certain kind of direction.

It is
now time to move from the speculative identifications of Modernism and briefly
take up the question of the consequences of these accounts for the connection
between Modernism Postmodernism and the puzzle about Greenberg’s response to
the riotous experimentation of the sixties, by assembling some observations
which can give shape to an answer.

First, given what has been said, it seems
to me that we could not accept any account of Modernism according to which
aesthetic value resides solely in a set of formal or essential properties of a
work the perception, or cognition, of which necessitate a positive judgement.
Neither could aesthetic value be some quantity or kind of pleasure which
someone receives from the work. Both suggestions locate the work as a thing
with no historical location and externalize value in a way which absolves it of
the necessity to live, or open a door or to be resolute and courageously free.
I take this to be a straight consequence of rejection of academicism. This
would to deny that a work is, as Heidegger puts it, a happening in truth. No mere virtuosic technique is enough by
itself to breath life into a work. At the same time our authors have as much as
told us that it is by the deployment of technique, and the forging of new
technique, that the work comes alive and presents the fact of the unpresentable
or recaptures something eternal within the present instant.

Secondly, any account of aesthetic value
needs to be able to account for the complicated fact that works of the past can
continue to shine forth as art although they could not now be duplicated as
art. Mozart made art by composing music in the manner of Mozart, but no one
today can make art by composing music in the manner of Mozart. Pollock made
paintings by composing paintings in the manner of Pollock, [19] but one cannot make art by imitating Pollock. Art
works are historical individuals which come alive only under certain conditions
and which, presumably, can wither and die under others. This fact makes
tradition and cultural literacy a crucial feature of aesthetic appreciation and
at the same time necessitates a certain relativity in our understanding of the
spaces in which genuine works can live. In a simple imaginary culture with a
unified canon, agreement in judgement would be perfect, but the real possibility
of this imaginative exercise is precisely what is denied by Kant’s (and the
others’) modernist reflection on Aufklärung. A cultural life, in which
freedom and the real coincide in the person of the free citizen, is an
experiment in the imagination which can at best only be partially realized.
That is because the happy citizens must freely and courageously agree in their thinking, which as Lyotard reminds us
necessarily entails a certain amount of coercion, social control and hence
terror, features which the imaginative experiment explicitly rules out.
Fortunately, as Kant has told us, artistic judgement does not necessitate
universal agreement but merely the idea of such agreement. The avant-garde is a
kind of shock force of an imaginary future which its members experience with
great vividness and which contains a wholeness existing only in artistic
representation and experimentation; in short, existing in works and labour
which come about as critique, by
way of a critical response to past works which are losing their revolutionary
character and the creation of works and cultural events connected as the
happening of a new strand of the cultural life.

How
much cultural knowledge does one need to appreciate one of these strands?
Clearly not very much: one of the principal and, I think, undeniable claims of
postmodern aesthetics, is that popular cultural forms, in their diversity and
localness, create adequate space for aesthetic engagement to happen and that
high art has no monopoly on authentic self-transformation. Although explicit
canonization, the development of notations and formal structures, can create a
platform for artistic experimentation, there is an end to it; such platforms
become too cumbersome to support spontaneous appreciation without induction
(and indoctrination) in the tradition. One cannot imagine the architectural
complexity of Beethoven’s works without explicit traditions of musical form
involving composition using notation prior to and independently of performance,
but at the same time there is no doubt that listeners do not need explicit
training in this tradition or the techniques of composition to be drawn into an
understanding of such music.

As sort of a conclusion let me say that I
have attempted to place Greenberg’s account of Modernism in “Modernist
Painting” in a context which shows it to be richer and more productive—more postmodern in Lyotard’s sense of the term—than it is
usually taken to be. If that is true then the puzzle of Greenberg’s lack of
sympathy with the riot of experimentation in popular culture which engulfed the
art world in the sixties cannot be attributed to a simple inadequacy of his
theoretical formulations. Perhaps the depth of his hostility to Kitsch and
middle-brow sensibility kept him from appreciating the new experiments more
clearly, or perhaps his wonderfully trained eye was too closely attuned to a
specific set of formal features. If either hypothesis is correct there is
little to criticise; the view that there is a singular place from which all of
art is aesthetically available is, after all, just one more version of the
fantasy of universal unforced agreement in the enlightened age. It is a great
strength of Greenberg’s account of Modernism that it does not indulge in this
fantasy.

In conclusion, let me briefly compare it
to the tale told by Arthur Danto in his piece, “The End of Art” and elsewhere,
that tale of the grand historical arc of Art beginning in the Renaissance, the
context of which is explicitly teleological and Hegelian. Art as an historical
phenomenon (an historical individual even) has a beginning and natural
trajectory of growth and self completion, beginning in a search for its own
inner nature and identity and coming to an end when it became fully self
conscious of itself as art. By answering the question, what does it take to
make something art, postmodern artists brought the history of art to a close
and have left us in an ahistorical tedium in which anything goes and technique
withers. The postmodern condition for Danto is then not what is most fully
alive in the modern, but post-art, that which happens after Art is dead. This
seems to me an important misunderstanding of the relation of modernism and
postmodernism. The very idea of the end of art, like the idea of an enlightened age, is a
fantasy. The fantasy of the end of art results from a refusal to take seriously
the irony in Kant’s account of enlightenment and the doubleness at the heart of
modernism.

Art,
like political culture, is in a permanent state of immaturity, it never grows
up or grows old or dies. In this way it is quite unlike the successive
movements and individual works which are to art as waves on the great sea of
human culture. This is because, like the ideal of a freely mature political
culture, it is an ideal which can only be realised in the resolute and
courageous exiting of immaturity by individuals who struggle together, and
sometimes alone, to make the eternal happen in the present moment.

[8] Jean-François
Lyotard, "Answering the question: What is Postmodernism?” (translated by
Régis Durand), in Ihab Hassan and Sally Hassan, eds., Innovation/Renovation:
New Perspectives on the Humanities, pp. 329-341. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1983.

[19] Pollock is
rather unhelpful in describing what he does in composing a work, as when
he says, “When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I am doing. It
is only after a sort of “get acquainted” period that I see what I have been
about.” [from possibilities, No. 1 (Winter, 1947-48)] Still, there is no
question that he can be imitated and that imitating him is not a way to make
art.